With our White Elephant party right around the corner, we were debating what to do with out of town guests. The potential was there for us to have almost a dozen people coming from out of town. As it is, we have five adults coming from New York, Florida and Virginia. We live in an area with plenty of hotels relatively close, but it still causes a moment of hesitation when you are asked to recommend places at which to make Hotel Reservations.
I know when I book reservations anywhere I like to see lots of pictures of the facilities, as well as a complete list of the amenities. With so many hotels in our general area, comparison shopping is a must. One thing I like about HotelReservations.com is that it doesn’t just include hotels and motels – it also included B&Bs on the search I did for the Charlotte, NC metro area. It also included vacation rental locations in the area, which other hotel search sites don’t do.
The website does have one thing missing that they need to add in the future – and that’s the ability for users to review the various hotels. I know I always appreciate reading the reviews written by people who have actually stayed there. That helps me determine if I’d feel comfortable in the location I’m reading about. Sometimes the ratings level doesn’t match the actual location (I know this happened to us when we went to Memphis – it was considered a 3-star hotel but was really more like a barely-2-star hotel about 100 yards from the city jail. If we had known that up front I wouldn’t have booked there! So in that regard, HotelReservations.com should definitely think about adding guest reviews on their website in order to compete with other reservation websites.
The website is well laid out, and easy to use. You are able to select which amenities you need to have during your stay, and it weeds out those that don’t fit your search requirements. The rates seemed comparable to other rates found online, and their cancellation policy was decent (some reservation websites do NOT allow cancellations, others take a one night’s stay fee for cancelling a reservation). The website not only shows you the hotels that fit your exact requirements, but goes on to create a separate list of hotels that are a close fit to your requirements, in case you are willing to be flexible.
As for us, in the end I think we’re able to fit all our out-of-town guests at our house, although the NY and FL folks are considering hotels at the moment since our NY person won’t have a car while he’s visiting.